Honolulu, Hawaii (September 27, 2011)—PacRim Marketing Group, a Honolulu-based international marketing firm specializing in the Asian traveler market, has been using social media to help promote its clients for more than three years.
President and CEO Dave Erdman said that, for instance, it has helped the Kahala Hotel & Resort set up an Asian language blog account. The East Oahu resort has an employee working solely on this venture.
“They have their inside person writing the blog that posts information,” Erdman said. “Not many companies have staff with marketing experience or Asian language ability.”
The first to tweet in Japanese, PacRim has interactive conversations with its nearly 20,000 Twitter followers on its five accounts on a daily basis, Erdman said. Google+ also holds promise, he said. Its estimated users in Japan alone range from 500,000 to 1 million, but it does not yet have a business component.
“We cannot make business pages in Japan yet, but in a few months a business version will be launched,” Erdman said.
While posting updates through Twitter, Facebook and blogs are important, companies also should be looking at video as a communications tool, Erdman said. It already is one of PacRim’s key strategic approaches to communicating messages to prospective travelers to Hawaii from Asia.
“We have some YouTube videos we have posted in Japanese that have over 50,000 views, which shows the power of this social network channel as a marketing communications platform,” he said.
PacRim, which also consults with Hawaiian Airlines, sent a YouTube videographer on the inaugural flight from Honolulu to Haneda, Japan, and utilized social media to communicate the essence of the airline’s brand in the Japanese market.
“Our team posted video on our blog posts, our Hawaii-Arukikata website and Japanese Facebook and tweeted and retweeted to our many followers and influencers,” Erdman said.
For PacRim Marketing Group, social media will continue to be one of the keys to its marketing strategy in Asia.
“Integrating the use of social media with traditional communications and public relations methods provides the biggest impact for clients trying to increase their share and spend of the Asian international traveler market,” Erdman said.
(Taken from Pacific Business News article)